Posthumous publication? What's that, you say? Well, posthumous means something that happens after someone's death ... so a posthumous publication is a work printed after a person's death.

Now that we have this straight, you'll be happy to know that a posthumous book by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), author of The Lord of the Rings, is going to be published in the Spring of 2007. The Children of Hurin is an epic tale about the elves and dwarves featured in many of Tolkien's stories. 

Tolkien began the saga in 1918, but never finished it. For the past 30 years, his son Christopher Tolkien, has been working on finishing the tale, using his father's manuscript and notes.

"It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of The Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers," Christopher Tolkien said in a statement. (Bits and pieces have been published in the past.)

We're sharing this good news with you on what turns out to be the anniversary of the day in 1937 when Tolkien published his first novel, The Hobbit.

The back story of his novel is pretty interesting--while working as a professor at Oxford, Tolkien used to work an extra job grading exams during the summer. One day, he was so bored that he wrote the following line on a blank page of a student's exam: "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit."

From The Writer's Almanac:

"Tolkien later said that he had no idea where the word "hobbit" came from. It had just popped into his head, out of nowhere. He was intrigued by it and decided to write a story to find out what a hobbit might be. In the story that resulted, he wrote a description of hobbits that said, in part, "[Hobbits] are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. ... They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow naturally leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it)."

Tolkien had been thinking for years about an imaginary place he called Middle-Earth full of dwarves, elves, and wizards. He decided that his story would concern a hobbit in this world named Bilbo Baggins who goes on an adventure to help steal a treasure from a dragon named Smaug, and along the way discovers a magical ring that turns him invisible. Tolkien wrote the book by hand, sitting on a tiny bed in his attic, finishing it sometime around the mid-1930s.

He showed it to a few friends, but he had no intention of publishing it until a former student of his got a job at a publishing house and began pestering him to give her the manuscript. He finally relented, and it came out on this day in 1937."

I told you it was a neat back story!